Dub and DJ

Jamaican producers in the rock steady era were among the first to realize the possibilities opened up by multi-tracking. Ska, as I've said, was among the most insistently rhythmic popular music produced up to that time. The style was defined by its beat: a whole genre piled on a single rhythm: something that in one way or another characterizes Jamaican and much world pop since that time. But ska was a bandstand type music, or at least it was conceived that way, even as it was played on sound systems.

Rock steady was also built on the beat: perhaps ska at half or quarter speed. On certain early rock steady records you can hear it directly: it's just slowed-down ska. At any rate, the rhythms were pretty simple, though profound, and the whole record was built on the bass line. The bass line, too, is no doubt what people move to, what moves people. And a variety of songs can be built on a single bass-and-drum line: a basic insight that is obvious from ska on out. Almost accidentally, it seems, Duke Reid started providing instrumental tracks with the vocals removed of his latest hits to Ruddy Redwood's sound in Spanish Town, and then other instruments could be added over the rhythm tracks.

The producers who ran sounds could thus make their music "modular," recycling popular rhythm tracks underneath more than one performer, and take one rhythm into a variety of hits. If it hit once, it was likely to hit again, a la Hollywood sequels. And then, the djs who worked the sound systems, people like Count Machuki and King Stitt, were stars in their own right, and like American radio djs of the same era, would talk a line of jive into the record. It was a pretty small step to conceiving of removing the vocals altogether and doing the instrumentals, allowing a dj to throw it on at the sound, then chatter over it throughout. That's the origin of rap music. (The one fundamental difference between the way hip hop and dj reggae are made would be "turntablism," which as far as I know was not really practiced on Jamaican sounds.)

Pretty soon, people actually wanted these "dub plates" themselves, and they became collector's items. And then Tubby and others started to be specialists in reprocessing rhythm tracks into distinct dub plates: they's move the vocals in and out seemingly arbitrarily, introduce strange shifts of phase and extreme echo effects, designed to make the instrumental record of interest in itself.

The dub or version side would be the b of the single, and by the mid-seventies, whole lps of dub sides were being produced, and the people who produced them (Scientist, for example) became stars in their own right. It's contemplative, vibed-out music, stoner stuff extraordinaire: perfect under almost any activity. It has direct offspring in the rhythm tracks of hip hop, like, say "Planet Rock," as well as in the "drum-and-bass" fad, as well as in the whole concept of the re-mix.

Great dub producers: Tubby (short man dub), Prince Jammy (Jammy and Tubby: drums of africa, Augustus Pablo (555 dub street), Yabby You, Errol Thompson (whose earliest work was contemporary with Tubby's), Keith Hudson.

Meanwhile, the dj tradition continued, as producers started recording the guys from the sounds over existing hits and putting out dj versions, which sometimes outsold the sung. We've got to mention U-Roy (king tubby skank), Dennis Alcapone, Dillinger (cf. Gangsta rap), I-Roy (maybe the best, for my money: make love), Big Youth (who took the dj into a "conscious" rasta/roots direction), Doctor Alimontado, Trinity.

alcapone: do deh natty

By the end of the seventies there were folks who had a compromise between toasting and singing (cf. Nelly): "singjays," among whom one would include eek-a-mouse and Mikey Dread, both of whom made great records.

In the early eighties, the dj over a sometimes incredibly simple mechanical rhtyhm came to predominate, and the lyrics shifted from "conscious" themes to 'slackness": i.e. explicit sexuality, again anticipating developments in hip hop. The Jamaican dj is currently a fixture of American r&b records.